This event is made possible through the generous support of Patrick J. Waide ’59 and the Waide Center for Applied Ethics.
When it comes to the most pressing social issues of the day, Kwame Anthony Appiah, PhD, is a touchstone of reason and inclusivity. Asking—and answering—probing questions on morality, ethnicity, and religion as “The Ethicist” for The New York Times Magazine, Dr. Appiah is a fearless, lucid arbiter. He demonstrated this in his BBC Reith Lectures on the modern complexities of creed, culture, color, and country, and in his book, The Lies That Bind, named one of the 50 Notable Works of the Year by The Washington Post.
Exciting and erudite, Dr. Appiah challenges us to look beyond the boundaries—real and imagined—that divide us, and to celebrate our common humanity. Named one of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 public intellectuals, one of the Carnegie Corporation’s “Great Immigrants,” and awarded a National Humanities Medal by The White House, Dr. Appiah currently teaches at NYU, though he’s previously taught at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Duke, and the University of Ghana.
Dr. Appiah’s book Cosmopolitanism is a manifesto for a world where identity has become a weapon and where difference has become a cause of pain and suffering. Cosmopolitanism won the Arthur Ross Book Award, the most significant prize given to a book on international affairs. In The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, he lays out how honor propelled moral revolutions in the past—and could do so in the future.
